WIP: Aphrael Lo-Res Model 1

Greetings and salutations! I was struggling to figure out if I wanted to highlight my modeling process step by step and in the end, I decided it probably would be a good idea to show what I actually do while I model. So today I decided to start off showing how I construct the main loops of the face first.

I always do the eyes first. The reason for this is because the eyes are the most important part of a character's face. They are almost literally a reflection of the character's soul. If not done correctly, the character doesn't look right and they can appear soulless. In addition, I can build the rest of the character's face off the main loops of the eyes.

When I do eyes, I used to just create continuous loops around the eye socket and be done with it. However, after some study of the eyelids and watching others do it, I realized that this wasn't really a good way to do it. The upper eyelids have some volume at their outer corners just outside the main shape of the eye and hence the edge loops need to reflect this. The best way I discovered how to mimic this is to create a sort of spiral loop around the eyes instead of a true loop. I have provided an example below so you can see what I mean:

The inner eye loop is a spiral, not a true loop.

Now normally I add more edge loops to define the eyelid area, but I am not ready to do that at this moment. I want to get the main shape of the face done first before I start adding detail and even then it will be minimal because I plan on having the baked normal map take care of most of the detail. Remember, this is supposed to have a low polygon count so I can't go crazy on the polygons.

Now that the eyes are out of the way, I next expand the edge flow around the tear ducts to flow around the shape of the nose, creating a nose loop as seen here:

The outside loop that defines the shape of the nose.

I am roughly following the guide that I created earlier for my edge flow layout. But that's all it is, a guide. I make adjustments accordingly so that the flow is smooth and generally follows the muscle groups. For example, I usually do full loops around the nostrils. However, since I am trying to keep the polygon count quite low, I decided it would be best to expand a new loop from the existing one instead, saving on polygons. Doing it this way also allowed me to create a partial loop to define the tip of the nose with only a few polygons and create a full loop around the nostrils and tip together. You can see this below:

The nose fully defined. Note the extra loop around the nostrils and tip.

Now that the nose was done, it was time to do the loops around the mouth. First was the upper lip. I just extruded and shaped the vertices from the original bottom polys of the nose loop and then extruded the rest of the shape from there. While I did this however, I paid close attention to the polygon count of the eye loop because the edge flow of the cheeks will connect the mouth and eyes together later so the character can smile or make other expressions. The four bottom edges on the eye loop will connect to the mouth loop in a very precise manner so I had to ensure that I wasn't just randomly adding polygons just for the fun of it. Afterwards, I extruded the bottom faces for the lower lip, making sure I keep the same polygon count as the upper lip. Here is the result:

The primary mouth loop.

The final shape of the lips was determined by extruding the inner edges and shaping the inner mouth first. Then all I had to do was add more edge loops inside and shape them to get this:

The complete lips.

Voila! The main facial loops are now completed: the eyes, the nose and the mouth. I will not go into details with the ear just yet. The ear is a whole different ball game and I will show that in the near future. However, those are the next things that will be modeled. The reason for that is because I find it much easier to model the head in pieces first then trying to connect everything together in one go. This will make it easier to connect each individual piece later as you can see here with the face. It is especially useful for when I do the ear. The ear is a very complex shape and requires quite a bit of polygons. I mean I don't have to model the shape exactly, but I like to try to help out the normal map a bit when I do the bake. Since the ear will have a lot of polygons, it will be easier to model it first and then connect it to the other parts of the head later. Some people model the entire cranium first and then connect the ears but I find that creates far too much work to be efficient in a small time frame. With the ears modeled first, I can define the cranium around them, making it much simpler and faster to model the rest of the head.

So anyway, that is the main loops for the face. I am at around 250 quads. The ears will add a significant amount to that. In total, I expect the head will be a thousand quads. That's okay however because this allows the face to be expressive with the minimum amount of polygons required. The next part of the lo-res model is the ears so stay tuned!